Filter-Bashing Alive and Well

Librarians say a Supreme Court ruling upholding legislation to shield minors from obscene online content will end up subjecting the broader population to another evil: bad filtering software.

In a decision Monday that drew a decisive thumbs down from the American Library Association, justices held 6-3 that a law requiring libraries to install filtering software or lose federal funding for providing Internet access does not violate the First Amendment.

Filtering opponents criticized the ruling on the grounds that even if the practice is constitutional, no one seems convinced that porn-blocking programs actually do their job.

"They don't work well at all, and in the decision many of the justices acknowledged that," said Rick Weingarten, director of the American Library Association office for information technology policy.

"The errors go both ways," Weingarten said. "First, it does not catch all pornography. How could it? And secondly, it blocks a lot of non-pornographic material."

The library association, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups, had argued in court to block implementation of the Children's Online Protection Act, passed in 2000.

The groups succeeded last year in convincing a federal appeals court in Philadelphia to declare the statute unconstitutional, largely on the basis that blocking software suppressed content that was not obscene.

In the Supreme Court's majority ruling, Chief Justice William Rehnquist took a different view. While he acknowledged that filtering programs may erroneously block access to Web pages that are "completely innocuous," he believed their use is acceptable so long as library patrons can rectify such problems easily.

"When a patron encounters a blocked site, he need only ask a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults) disable the filter," he wrote.

The ruling gave a boost to filtering software providers such as N2H2, Websense and SurfControl. Shares of N2H2 (NTWO), a leading provider of filtering software to schools, benefited most dramatically, soaring 23 percent in Monday trading.

But while filtering firms basked in the afterglow of the Supreme Court ruling, the decision set off a firestorm of criticism from opponents of mandatory blocking, who laid out a fresh list of reasons why the technology is far too faulty to be required in schools and libraries.

"There's tremendous collateral damage from the use of these products," said Will Doherty, executive director of the Online Policy Group, which published a study Monday in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation that critiqued top filtering products.

The study (PDF) concluded that for every Web page correctly blocked as advertised, one or more was inappropriately blocked.

In several cases, Doherty said, researchers could find no logical reason why a site was deemed off-limits. In one example, a top-selling filtering program blocked a primer on punctuation, tagging it as containing adult or sexually explicit material. Another filter assigned a pornography block code to a Colorado Arts Education page on model content standards for theater.

Another concern libraries have with blocking software, Weingarten said, is the lack of information about the methodologies used to categorize sites.

"Companies treat both their stop lists and decision matrixes as trade secrets," he said. "Libraries are instructed to install these filters and they don't even know what's on the block list and what the criteria are for blocking."

David Burt, spokesman for N2H2, contends that filtering programs have improved substantially in recent years, with better blocking of obscene content and fewer instances of faulty filtering.

"We've gotten better at identifying pornographic websites as they come up," he said. The filtering firm also has developed a more detailed system for categorizing individual sites.

That said, Burt admitted that filtering technology will never be perfect, given the vast and decentralized nature of the Web. But like Rehnquist, Burt said he believed the occasional erroneous block does not present a grave problem so long as librarians can disable filters when requested.

The way the statute is written, an adult (defined in this context as a person who is at least 17 years old) can request a librarian to turn off filtering software that was installed for the purpose of protecting minors. Justices ruling for the majority believed this caveat was crucial to ensure the use of filters did not violate the First Amendment.

The American Library Association, however, contends that patrons could be too intimidated to seek out content if they have to ask a librarian's permission to disable filters before accessing certain sites.

Weingarten said disabling software could be technically difficult as well, since many libraries run programs from a network and would not have an easy way of turning off filters for a single computer.